About

TheArtist

Artist and designer, working in Nigeria between flat saturated grounds and coloured pencil on paper.

Contemporary African Artist

Nigeria / 2026

Meet the Artist

Adetayo
Studios

Adetayo StudiosEst. 2014

An arm reaching up through torn paper with a fist closed around a halo, by Adetayo

Untitled (Breakthrough), digital drawing

Biography

The joy behind
the crown

Adetayo works two ways that have almost nothing in common. One is digital, drawn fast in scribble over flat fields of violet, red and black. The other is coloured pencil on paper, layered over weeks until the tooth of the sheet stops showing.

The halo keeps coming back in the digital work. Worn, unwound, doubled, and once gripped in a fist. The pencil portraits stay with a single person, close in, and spend colour on two or three things at most.

The digital drawings go out as signed archival prints. The pencil works are one of one on paper, signed on the reverse. Both are sold by enquiry.

Currently obsessed with

  • Halos
  • Flat saturated grounds
  • Scribble density
  • Graphite portraits
  • Rationed colour
  • Hand-lettered margins
10
Works in the gallery
2
Bodies of practice
1 of 1
Every original